Approximately 1,600 Salt Lake Community College students headed back to the classroom for the first day of classes on October 19. That’s when the 34,000-student college, Utah’s largest public institution, started its new academic calendar: a condensed eight-week semester, with classes twice as long, running along with the normal 16-week semester already in session.
Utah public colleges and universities saw a 6.2-percent increase in enrollment this year, and the college is testing the extra term as a measure to accommodate the influx. Christopher L. Picard, who took over as the provost of academic affairs this year, oversees the effort.
Q. Why two semesters with different lengths at the same time?
A. At the opening of the semester, we were at 20 students per classroom, which if you know how it works at community colleges, is a pretty high ratio of students to instructor. Having said that, we didn’t want to cut off students who were seeking late admission, so we created a second semester overlaid on top of a first semester, with an eight-week delay in the start. It will give students access without waiting until January to begin their courses.
Q. Who was the target audience?
A. We intended to run the sorts of courses that beginning students would be required to take at any institutions, such as freshman composition, algebra, and core distribution courses. In a community college, the challenge is finding the kind of support students require to improve, getting them the kind of testing that will get them to the right level, and the planned services they need to enter college.
Q. When you say the students need support or register late, what makes you think they will succeed in class sessions that are twice as long?
A. I think the better advisement, in getting them in the right courses at the right level, is provisional to success. Now, this is the first time we’ve done it, so we haven’t done any of the follow-up measures, except in terms of enrollments and how those were subscribed.
Q. Is this creating any extra preparation for the professors teaching two classes with different semester lengths at the same time? That sounds tough.
A. There’s the fact that they’re teaching within the eight-week term—they had eight weeks to prepare. Many instructors at community colleges also teach during the summer, so it’s not an unusual circumstance. They received notice at the beginning of the semester. Most are also volunteers, and just a few of the 60 classes offered have professors who are teaching courses with different lengths at the same time. But it may require some rethinking in the pacing of the course in how to make a lecture worth two hours instead of one, and how to get all the material taught in eight weeks as opposed to 16. But in terms of their actual instructional load, it’s simply a part of their position. We’re not a research institution, so the focus of professors here is on delivery of instruction and development of curriculum.
Q. What challenges might they encounter when teaching two different-length classes at the same time?
A. Let’s say you’re teaching freshman composition and have eight-week and 16-week sections in the same semester. You would have to think about the lesson plans differently—say, what you’re doing Monday morning and what you’re doing on Monday afternoon. On the other hand, it’s not exceptionally different from offering first-semester and second-semester freshman composition, or teaching a literature course and a freshman-composition course in the same semester. It’s just two different ways an instructor prepares for class at the beginning of the day.
Q. What kind of feedback have you received so far from professors and students in these classes?
A. For the most part, the feedback is positive. It eliminates the amount of turmoil on the first week of classes—the drop-adds, the move-arounds, etc. So that’s a positive thing for both the instructors and the students. It’s not being seen as an extra burden. They might have to prepare for that class a little bit differently. But instructors at many community colleges have to prepare for three to four different classes during the course of the semester, regardless. Most of the students just take it for what it is.